Vegetable Orchestra
For the last 27 years, the Vegetable Orchestra in Vienna, Austria, has been playing with their food. The 11 musicians that make up this unorthodox band prepare for their concerts by hollowing out carrots and celery, peeling onion skins and cutting aubergines (eggplants), and piling up fresh produce onstage to create their distinctive sounds. Throughout their decade-spanning history cooking up fresh new hits, the band has performed 344 concerts on their veggies, officially becoming the uncontested record holders for most concerts by a vegetable orchestra. “We believe that we can produce sound that cannot be (easily) produced by other instruments. You can hear the difference. It sometimes sounds like animals, sometimes just like abstract sounds,” says the Orchestra. “You can say that the vegetables’ ‘hidden’ inside sounds of life are brought to the surface and made visual during the performance.”
“You can make music out of nearly everything, each thing contains a very specific acoustic quality and represents an intricate universe of sound,” they said. “Each thing could be a tool to open up that point of view.” The band members came from musical backgrounds spanning multiple genres like electronic, rock, punk, and classical. The band is constantly finding new sounds and developing new instruments. In the video below, some of their classics include the carrot recorder, a cucumberphone, percussive pieces of aubergine or even a leek violin. The performers purchase all of the vegetables fresh the day of their performance, and the audience can see in live-time how the sounds of the instruments change as they break and dry out in the stage lights; such as a carrot recorder, a cucumberphone, radish bass flute, percussive pieces of eggplant and a leek violin.
You can hear the difference. It sometimes sounds like animals, sometimes just like abstract sounds,” the orchestra explains on its website. The innovative group is constantly inventing new instruments. After their concerts, they even serve the audience soup made of the vegetables they had leftover from preparing the instruments. “In some cases, the changes of the sound while using the vegetable is characteristic for the piece,” they say. “On the other hand, a melody instrument like the carrot recorder or the radirimba [radish marimba] should be constant, at least as long as the song lasts.” The Vegetable Orchestra does take their work seriously, and they have created their own system for composing and recording their pieces. “There are many possibilities and our music works in many different places” – which is true, considering they’ve toured across Europe and in hundreds of different venues.
Green Vegehumor
Did you know “Vegetarian” is a Native American word?
It means “Lousy Hunter”
A vegan said to me, “People who sell meat are gross!”
I said, “People who sell fruits and vegetables are grocer.”
What’s the hardest part of being a vegan?
Waking up at 4.30 am to milk the almonds.
If a kid named Hunter became vegetarian, what should his name be?
Gatherer.
March 11th Birthdays
1993 – Jodie Comer, 1993 – Jude Demorest, 1983 – Thora Birch, 1994 – Sarah Molinski
1997 – Chase Crawford, 1926 – Ralph Abernathy, 1971 – Johnny Knoxville, 1936 – Antonin Scalia